Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Say you’re in a conversation and the other person becomes bored, or agitated, or whatever. If you recognize the boredom or agitation, you might choose to steer the conversation in some other direction. But what if you’re autistic? Autistic people often get into all sorts of predicaments with their difficulty of recognizing emotions in others.

Though it sounds like something you’d see on a late night informercial, the MIT media lab has come up with a potential solution. New Scientist Technology - Device warns you if you’re boring or irritating describes the contraption. Still has a way to go to become small and unobtrusive enough to use in most situations, but it’s an interesting idea.

And it turns out it’s not just for the autistic:

Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people’s emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid. “I would love it if you could have a computer looking at each student in the room to tell me when 20 per cent of them were bored or confused.”

Hey, are you paying attention to this? Does this make sense?

There’s been a kind of cultural debate about the impact video games are having on our culture. Do they waste time, cultivate violent outlooks and promote obesity, or do they provide something positive to those who play them? Steven Johnson argues eloquently that video games are probably actually making us smarter in “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter” Not surprisingly, the creator of one of the most popular games goes even farther in Wired 14.04: Dream Machines. Sims creator Will Wright thinks the video game-playing generation different from those who’ve come before, and their impact will be different:

In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers’ mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

And he thinks it’s actually scientific to play, in the broadest sense of that term:

The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens. This isn’t a random process; it’s the essence of the scientific method. Through trial and error, players build a model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play. As the players refine this model, they begin to master the game world. It’s a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. And it’s a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, read-the-manual-first approach of their parents.

The debate about the value of playing video games will no doubt continue. But guys like Johnson and Wright make a compelling case on the plus side.

Technorati Tags: games

I think it’s working. The ideas about collaborative web filters I wrote about last week, that is. This morning a feed from one of the filters belched out Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them - Boxes and Arrows. On the surface, the topic author Donna Maurer explored was information architecture. More specifically, it was broad design approaches for sites that help people find what they’re looking for. But to me, I see a relationship between some of these ideas and my practice in the Feldenkrais Method.

Maurer paints us four categories for seeking information:

• You can know what you’re looking for and be able to describe it;
• You can have some idea of what you’re looking for but not be able to articulate it;
• You can have virtually no idea of what you’re looking for, probably because you don’t know that thing exists;
• You know that you’ve seen the information before, but can’t remember where.

It was the second (exploratory) and especially the “don’t know what you need to know” ideas that caught my attention. Feldenkrais is not a household word, and probably not likely to become one any time soon. But, almost anyone might want to at least hear about the potential benefits , especially people with arching backs from sitting at their computers for long stretches without a break. I want to explore this further.

I would probably never have never stumbled across these ideas with the collaborative web filter feed article that caught my eye. Guess I didn’t know what I was looking for, but found it nonetheless. See, it’s working already.

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, findability

A pit bull can tear the living shit out of you.

That’s bad, right? Well, yes and no, at least according to gladwell.com: The PitBull Paradox . You don’t want to get attacked, but when you see a pit bull, you know it’s an aggressive dog in times of stress, so you probably give it a wide berth. The dog’s demeanor and behavior meets your expectations, and you can act accordingly. And safely.

You probably won’t go out of your way for a dachshund or chihuahua. Maybe you should, at least according to an emergency vet quoted in the post:

As an emergency vet in Las Vegas, I see lots of pit bulls. I would rather work on a pit bull than any other breed as they are very sincere and don’t change their temperament 1/2 way through the exam. They let me know up front -” I’m going to kill you if I get the chance”, and they get muzzled and drugged. Many german shepard dogs, american eskimos and some retrievers will decide that they want to eat my jugular veins as I listen their heart after giving no indication of aggression up to that point. They are very dangerous. I think the most vicious breeds are daschunds and chihuahuas.

Gladwell uses the quote as an example of one type of the paradox in a non-intuitive sort of statistics. That is, the reasons bad stuff happens are not always as they might seem, and they’re probably predictable if you just stop and thing about it.

If, for example, a drug company company came up with the best anti-depressant in the world–something twice as good as Prozac–we would EXPECT that drug to be associated with, say, more reports of suicide ideation. Why? Because it would be prescribed overwhelmingly to the hardest cases, to the most depressed and suicide-prone sector of the psychiatric population.

As for me, I’m sticking with cats.

Blog Design Solutions is the book I’ve been hoping to find. As a recent convert to Wordpress, I’d been looking for a manual that could reveal it’s workings and how to change them if I wanted. To be sure, there’s lots of Wordpress stuff online, but I’ve been finding myself working pretty hard to dig out the useful bits. It’s probably because I’m not versed in PHP, mySql, or really much on anything on the server side.

Enter Blogging Design Solutions. There’s a chapter on Wordpress that takes a lot of the mystery out of playing around with themes, markup and exactly how the damn thing works. Very useful and that alone is worth the price of the book.

But the real value for me was the clearly written explanation of how to get Apache, mySql, PHP and even myPHPadmin running on my local machine. That’s allowed me to put a copy of Wordpress locally so that I hack with it to my heart’s content and not screw up the blog running on the server.

There are other chapters on Moveable Type, Expression Engine or Textpattern. And there’s even a chapter on how to cobble together your own content management system.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Neurons Generated in The Adult Brain Learn To Respond To Novel Stimuli . A study at Mass General Hospital finds new neurons develop in the brain well into adulthood. Even better news: those neurons are flexible enough to aid learning and memory. The catch is the brains were in mice and in the part of their brain that deals with sense of smell. No small thing for a mouse; they gotta be able to continuously adapt their sense of smell to survive and do mousely things.

The implications are pretty exciting of course. To be able to adapt these new neurons to repair damaged brain tissue would give hope in a lot of conditions considered fairly hopeless today.

But the thing that interests me most here is the role of experience, of behavior and environment, in using the new neurons. It took placing the mice in a novel environment to reveal just how dramatic this generation of new neurons could be. It takes structure and function together to make meaningful change in almost any context I can think of.

Learning is key. It’s what builds on the new tissues to allow change in functioning:

An associate professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, (Jeffrey) Macklis also notes, “These results can contribute to our efforts, and those of others in the field, to repair diseased brain and spinal cord by directed development of specific neurons from precursor/stem cells. Our experiments show that new neurons can join brain circuits and function in complex ways - contributing to learning, memory and potentially to motor function - and that we may need to retrain the brain to use the new neurons effectively.”(emphasis mine).

Consensus Web Filters made a big impression on me. And it’s not just me; there are lots and lots of links to that post all over the place. So when I stumbled across Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War, I was hungry for the information.

This article focuses on whether future collaborative-style news sites will depend more on human-edited or algorithmic sources. It pretty much picks algorithms over meat. Sites like Digg and its ilk depend heavily on submissions from web surfers.

But it seems the filtering services offered by these sort of sites are both too broadly and too narrowly focused at the same time. Mary Hodder of Attention Trust (a fascinating topic on its own) like the current sites, but thinks they’re too narrowly focused:

“Digg and Memeorandum are definitely an order of magnitude better than anything we got from any top-down news organization, but when I look at them, I see all the things that are missing,” said Hodder, CEO of the video aggregation startup Dabble. “Digg and Memeorandum are catching one slice, and it’s fantastic and a total breath of fresh air, because it’s not The New York Times or the L.A. Times. But it’s still only one slice. If you are really going to nail this, you have to have thousands of slices.”

The gist of her argument is the limitation imposed by submissions from a limited group, and suggests than many more perspectives need to be taken into consideration for the filters to be really useful.

Almost to support the algorithmic approach, I checked out a new filter mentioned in the article, Tailrank. When you join Tailrank, you submit a list of feeds you’ve been reading. The sites secret recipe shakes and bakes though them to make a constantly-updated customized list of recommendations. Though the algorithm isn’t revealed, it obviously depends on links to blogs; the more links, the higher the rank, probably.

A drop down menu on the user’s page lets you select the number of links to use for a filter (this is after you’ve signed up for a free membership). When I selected 2 links, Tailrank returned 136 blog posts, 8 links 28 articles and so forth. So it was a little ironic that when I set the filter to use the maximum number of links (35), it turned up just one article: Consensus Web Filters.

Baseball wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if every player could hit the curve ball. To say the least, it’s difficult to predict where a curving ball will end up. Inaccurate predictions often end up with batters swingly wildly at thin air while the ball plops into the catcher’s glove elsewhere.

Cathy Craig, a psychologist at Queen’s University Belfast, UK got interested in curving balls, from watching soccer, not baseball. She wondered if experienced soccer players could accurately predict whether or not spinning soccer balls would end up missing or hitting inside a goal. They couldn’t - at least in the virtual reality display that Craig used in her test.

Craig suggests it might all be a case of need for adaptation:

The side spin on the ball produces something called a Magnus force, which accelerates the ball in a direction that we simply are unable to process, says Craig. We can anticipate the effect of gravity on moving objects, as that has been important in evolution. “But spinning balls don’t occur naturally. Why would nature bother having a visual system that’s adapted to them?” says Craig.

But obviously some players can cope with curving balls quite well, at least sometimes. What do they know that other don’t? It just might be that they’ve somehow learned this adaptation and then filed it away so that they can respond automatically - and very rapidly.

Though it’s hard to predict the path of curving baseballs and soccer balls, many golfers know where their drives are going to curve toward: the trees, or maybe the sandtrap.

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Sometimes writing can be dark and light at the same time. One I ran across recently is Gray Area:Thinking with a Damaged Brain. Author Floyd Skloot gives a well-written account of what it’s like to live a creative life with a brain noticeably damaged by a virus almost 20 years ago.

Skloot goes on (and on) about the frustrating everyday experiences he’s enduring as a result of the damage. But he also reveals some gems along the way, like how he’s learned to manage some of his creative activities:

The duel is fought over and over. I have developed certain habits that enable me to work — a team of seconds, to elaborate this metaphor of a duel. I must be willing to write slowly, to skip or leave blank spaces where I cannot find words that I seek, compose in fragments and without an overall ordering principle or imposed form. I explore and make discoveries in my writing now, never quite sure where I am going but willing to let things ride and discover later how they all fit together. Every time I finish an essay or poem or piece of fiction, it feels as though I have faced down the insult.

and;

In many important respects, then, I have already gotten better. I continue to learn new ways of living with a damaged brain. I continue to make progress, to avenge the insult, to see my way around the gray area. But no, I am not going to be the man I was. In this, I am hardly alone.

Reading the essay is not always easy going, but it’s worth taking a peek at this guy’s clearly-written experiences.

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Been experimenting again with designs for this blog. The old style looked like this. The new one you see here results from lots of reading and trying things out, and from trying out the demo version of StyleMaster CSS editor.

If you’re ever looking for way to fill up lots of time, give coding up style sheets and html documents a try.

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